The Maker's Philosophy with Robin Sloan

**This is a machine-generated transcript. Errors are possible. The audio recording is the authoritative version of this episode.**

Lee Schneider (00:29.326)
Welcome to the show. It's so nice to have you here.

Robin (00:31.896)
Thanks for the invitation, it's real pleasure.

Lee Schneider (00:33.874)
Super. So let's talk a little bit about the pleasure of making things. I know you make olive oil because I just ordered some and we have to have olive oil around here or else things stop working. And you've written about the pleasures of old computers and old technology. You have a whole book about which displays a deep understanding of sourdough bread.

even to the point of sentience, so pretty radical there. And I read that at a time when we were making a lot of sourdough around here. So my question is, was this always the case for you or is it something you've come into this kind of joy of the maker reality?

Robin (01:19.694)
Yeah, that's great question. And I think the answer, as I think back, is sort of two things at once. On one hand, my adult life has definitely been a, you know, let me put it this way. I was a computer kid and a reader. And I think if you had met me at age 12 or 13, you would not have thought this is a kid who is ever going to bake a loaf of sourdough bread.

Or manufacture olive oil or run big machines or really find any interest in in that kind of stuff At the same time I think if you had looked closely if you had maybe been a little charitable in your assessment you would have noticed that I was drawing and printing out comic books That I was making web pages, you know As soon as as soon as that was something that was available to me in like for me was very late high school And then of course early college

there was this thing called the web and there was a thing called a web browser and the fact that those were just so malleable and they were like, I mean, it was, it was like, it was the digital version of going to Kinko's. Of course I'm betraying my vintage there. Going to Kinko's, the copy shop and yeah, exactly right, right, whatever. And so, as I reflect on it, I realized that the impulse was always there. I always was somebody who...

Lee Schneider (02:32.282)
You mean FedEx Office.

Robin (02:43.982)
Again, I think some of it is temperamental. It's almost beneath the level of conscious choice. It just got wired in at some point and I'm happy that it did. But I always did love making media, both physical and digital media. And then I think to my great benefit, through choices of my own and also just some good random chance, those interests kind of broadened to encompass more things than just comics and books and websites.

Lee Schneider (03:13.286)
Right, right. It's been one of the pleasures of reading your work and reading your blog and your output generally is you have this omnivorous approach where it doesn't matter if it's physical. It's nice when it's physical, but it could also be digital. could also be something you've built. You've coded some apps. You can go to Robin's.

website and see how many people have have his books on hold in libraries. So I find that interesting. Do you is it just you don't need the distinction? It's just like let's use the tools at hand.

Robin (03:52.406)
Yeah, yeah. you know, I actually think it's, you know, going back to that interest in that my early interest in computers and again, certainly I would have self identified as someone who is interested in, know, air quotes technology. And it took me probably a little too long to understand that everything is technology, you know, the kitchen is packed of tech packed full of technology. It's anyway, what a sweet of incredible tools that have been honed and refined and advanced over, you know, generations and generations.

Lee Schneider (04:11.246)
Okay.

Robin (04:21.902)
I think something that actually, you know, it's interesting to reflect on sometimes the practical benefits in your own life of creative work, you know, or even of something like writing a novel. I think often of my research, actually, my reading of the history of the book and of publishing and of libraries and things like that for Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore, which was my first novel. And, you know, of course I went into that project with a great

interest in books, you know, as well as technology. And about halfway through that, that project of, of learning and reading, I mean, I just realized that there is no distinction whatsoever. And especially at that time, you know, maybe it seemed that point seems a little sharper because a lot of folks really wanted you to choose sides as it were, you know, this is the 2010s and it's the era of the Kindle, you know, and the ebook is still kind of a new thing at that time. And so you'd hear like, well, which will it be? You know, where will you

Where will you plant your flag on the side of books or on the side of technology? you know, that might, it's not a great insight, but it was my insight that I came late to is that the question is malformed. Books are profound technology and not just a heritage technology. They continue to change and improve and, you know, the tools for their production are constantly, you know, changing and getting better and more capable. Anyway.

Lee Schneider (05:29.905)
Hmm.

Robin (05:44.556)
That is all to say, that's a really long-winded way of saying, yeah, I do refuse to choose, but I think that that refusal is quite principled, because I think it's all sort of the same thing, or it's all just versions of the same thing.

Lee Schneider (05:57.421)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm remembering and probably misremembering an Ursula Le Guin quote about she was being taken to task for not writing hard science fiction. And she said something like, similar to what you just said, it's all technology, you know, to the right person, a campfire is technology. It doesn't matter.

Robin (06:15.372)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, and I do, and I think it's, you know, there's a version of that that's a little cute and you kind of go, okay, well, thanks, I guess. But I think there's another version that's quite profound. by looking at those things as technologies, by not consigning them to, yes, it's so cute and warm and fuzzy and it's, heritage and it's tradition. But by saying like, no, this is,

Lee Schneider (06:24.668)
Yeah.

Lee Schneider (06:37.243)
You

Robin (06:42.956)
rich real muscular stuff. Hard fought too, you know? Like, again, the kitchen has become a favorite site of this analysis for me. You can pick up any tool. You could pick up the most bargain basement chef's knife that you got from Target or whatever, and that thing is a absolute miracle of metallurgy and mass production and shipping. To say nothing of the shipping, you know, that brought it to the Target shelf.

Lee Schneider (06:46.29)
Hmm.

Robin (07:09.326)
I think that's right. I think that analysis is actually the right one at the end of the day.

Lee Schneider (07:15.43)
And I love that about for listeners being introduced to Robin's books, it's Mr. Pernumbers, it's Sourdough and Moonbound, Moonbound being the last, and quite a big departure in tone anyway, but maybe not in technology, just to continue on that theme, because that technology of wizardry, space travel, it's all still there. It's kind of a...

Jules Verne-esque in the future vision of what that technology would get us. But I find that fascinating that you've, there's a question in here somewhere, I'm getting to it. You find a really humanist take on machines and on technology. It's not about some kind of AI that's gonna take over our jobs or some kind of nonsense. There's a real.

integration in, say, just to pick one thing out of a many layered book, the way cities are seen. What will the cities of the future be like? Well, they're going to have recycling. They're going to have roads many ways in and many ways out. There's going to be housing that serves lots of people, not just the elite. And that's all technology, but it's not presented as such, which I find fascinating, really.

Robin (08:38.254)
Yeah!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, I, you know, again, not to ever, not to ever kind of pose as somebody who had it figured out from the beginning or was, you know, just, just bringing, you know, their wisdom to the table. I, really acknowledge my own evolution in this regard. And I, I personally, if I, if I wasn't the writer, I, I think it'd be kind of interesting to look at the, the sequence of books by this author, Robin Sloan, as, as an indication of someone's evolution and kind of unfolding awareness of, of the s-

the scope of technology and also, I mean, frankly, the richness of the physical. There is physical stuff and certainly a celebration of the physical printed book in Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore. But then you go from there to sourdough and it's a lot goopier. There's sourdough starter and people doing stuff, all sorts of real stuff in real space. And then, I actually think that that really does accelerate and expand in Moonbound.

Lee Schneider (09:25.724)
Hahaha.

Robin (09:38.158)
You know, I really, wanted one of the things I myself appreciate as a writer about certain science fictions is a real tactile material future. know, people talk about the future that has some like rust and grit and dirt, you know, and yeah, dirt, the dirt under the fingernails of the future. And I want to do at least attempt to create some of that, some of that, you know, solidity, you know, that real sense of real mass and space for my.

for my far future, you know? both, as some folks listening might know, or I'll be telling some for the first time, the story is set 13,000 years in the future. And when you're working that far in the future, it's both a burden because you, it's sort of comical, like no one could ever know what's going to happen. But it's also quite freeing because no one can ever know what's going to happen. So you can just imagine anything you want.

Lee Schneider (10:25.425)
Yes.

Lee Schneider (10:31.143)
Yeah, the world building of the three books, including the tactile, including with sourdough, with bread. Sidebar, my son read that. When he read it, he was about 11, and he's not a big fan of super abstract books.

But he read that and loved it because we were making sourdough at the time. And it was his introduction to the three body problem and other books that were far more abstract.

Robin (10:54.968)
Yeah.

Robin (11:00.618)
Awesome. man, that's great. That's ideal. That's an ideal when a book is not only enjoyed, but also becomes like a bridge or a springboard. That's the coolest thing. That's great.

Lee Schneider (11:07.729)
Yeah, yeah, because you can this the notion of world building, you know, we often we get pretty heady about that and your people are not only they real, but they're extraordinarily kind. There is this undertow, you know, for science fiction to be described as kind or even fantasy to be described as kind is, think, very unusual. I don't know how you feel about that.

Robin (11:33.838)
Sure. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I agree with you. Why is that? You know, I actually think back, for me, first of all, it's a good observation. And I think it's actually a very interesting observation. There's a sense, you encounter this a little bit more in discussions about like script writing for movies and TV, kind of the the televisual arts. But there's a little bit of backwash into novels too. And the discussion is about stakes, the stakes of a story.

And the observation, which is not wrong, is that a story with high stakes, know, literal life or death, maybe of whole kingdoms, you know, or the universe itself or whatever, it's quite gripping, right? You you just know. In fact, I just, read an advanced copy of a novel coming out and it had scenes, has scenes of such peril. And I mean, it was that feeling of being absolutely glued to the page. There was no way conceivable that I was going to put down that book because I had to know.

how this stuff was resolved. So the observation that stakes are important and that these dire stakes, and often that come that, you know, I think is twinned with a certain kind of grimness or, yeah, there's darkness there. I mean, that's often the engine for those kind of stakes. So that's the observation. Back when I was writing Mr. Pernumber's 24-hour Bookstore in an early draft, I mean, kind of a primordial version of the book,

I was, you know, an obedient student of these lessons or trying to be, and I was putting in all this stuff. I mean, this is to sound quite embarrassing, honestly, but I will reveal that there were these scenes where, like, I don't know, bibliophile ninjas were, like, invading the 24-hour bookstore, and they were on a mission, you know, and they were, you could imagine it out of some Christopher Nolan movie. They were rappelling in, and it was wild, part of this, you know, this ancient cult.

Lee Schneider (13:07.505)
you

Lee Schneider (13:23.217)
I'm

Robin (13:28.098)
Very cinematic. And as I was writing it, know, and kind of contemplating what I was putting down on the page, I realized that if it was me in this adventure, you if I was the character on the page, at the instant the first ninja appeared, I would say, well, I'm good. Nope. I got to go, guys. I'm going home. I called the police. I would leave. And that would be the end of the story. And of course, you know, can then, there's kind of two responses to that. One is you can engineer a way around that so that the...

the characters, even greater peril, and they don't have any alternatives other than to confront the ninjas. Or you can take the path that I took, which is to say, or kind of to accept the challenge, which is like, can I produce a story that is compelling and magnetic and like, unput downable, but exists within, like, below the threshold of like, the stakes of the real world and real life as we know it?

And I just really thought the answer to that was yes. It had to be yes, because, you know, in our day-to-day life, we encounter things that are very dramatic, you know, and we tell our friends stories about them, and we obsess about them, and we worry about them, and mostly it's not ninjas. Mostly. And so anyways, I think that actually was a pretty important kind of level set for my whole fiction writing career, because I made that choice. I wrote the book that way.

And in my estimation, and then certainly for the reading public, it was very successful. I mean, think people agreed with my assessment, and they took the gambit, and it worked. So ever since, I've kind of thought, I think, and maybe that's kind of my role, right? Maybe that's my slot or my niche. I can find ways to produce stories that are just

They are charismatic and gripping and magnetic and interesting and all that kind of stuff, but that can all unfold within the realm of like, I mean, yeah, as you say, kindness and a certain amount of warmth. know, sometimes the shorter way to say it is, it is not necessary for people to be like tied to chairs and beaten with hoses. That's actually strictly optional.

Lee Schneider (15:40.124)
Right, yeah.

Right. Yeah. Well, you know, the original rule is first kill Bambi's mother. That's what you do first to create high stakes. And there are many great writers like Neil Schusterman, who wrote Scythe, which is about killing people. The whole series is about basically killing people. So it's, you know, it's a gripping book, but I find I'm getting kind of...

Robin (15:50.146)
Yeah, right, right, right, Yep. Yep.

Robin (16:04.011)
Yeah, yeah.

Lee Schneider (16:11.405)
grim reaper fatigue in reading some books. And of course, I'm going to say I don't get that with your books because it has to do with the world building. You when you build a world that we can care about, can care about the people. Yes, it matters that your brother is in danger by a wizard who's gone insane. You know, that's a problem. That's a problem.

Robin (16:13.304)
Yeah.

Lee Schneider (16:36.515)
You know, it's not literally the gun at your head kind of problem. you know, takes, I think it takes a lot more work and reminding the audience and just more fully realized characters. And there's just a lot more heavy lifting there that has to be done.

Robin (16:53.1)
Well, I appreciate that. I really appreciate that assessment. And of course, I think you're right. And mostly I just, do, I always want to insist that it can be done and it's kind of worth just providing the examples so that, you know, there's other folks out there writing or imagining stories and how they might come together. And the gravity of that high stakes, you know, grim and grisly universe, I think it's more potent than it's ever been. It feels mandatory sometimes.

you again, certainly you look at film and TV and you're like, wow, it's a whole, it's multiple streaming services just packed full of malignant characters kind of clawing at each other. And you're like, really? this reality? Is this the human condition? I mean, I would actually layer another piece onto that, which was another decision that I made in the composition of Penumbra and have carried forward ever since. Talk about the insane wizard and all the other.

villains, know, air quotes villains that I've had in my books, I decided that I was never going to put a line in any character's mouth, including a notional villains that was to me, obviously wrong and stupid. It was never going to be a case of, know, kind of, you know, being the ventriloquist and then turning to the puppet and saying, hey, get a load of this asshole, right, which is kind of a cheap shot against a fictional character who doesn't have any choice.

more interesting, I thought, to make it all true. Because mean, that is also our real world. mean, you could have a group of 10 smart, thoughtful people, and they could all opine about something. And many of those opinions and statements would be contradictory. And you'd have to say, well, this is interesting, isn't it? How do I resolve this? And so that's not to say that I agree with everything that everybody says equally in all of my books. There's some sentiments that are

closer to my heart. I mean, if again, if a person was highly motivated, perhaps fulfilling the graduate requirements for a very specific degree program, they could go through they could go through my novels and they could pick out all the lines, you know, the lines from from Corvina, the head of the the biblical cult in Penumbra, lines from from Mr. Mero, the mysterious sort of presiding figure of this of this strange

Robin (19:15.926)
experimental kind of farmers market in sourdough and then certainly all the lines from Mallory and moonbound and you'd line them all up on the page and there would not be a single thing on that page that I didn't think at least was an interesting thought to have.

Lee Schneider (19:30.547)
Well, yeah, it makes it harder to dismiss them as just, that's Voldemort or whatever. Yeah, they all have noses. I've written cartoons and I've written for Thundercats and I've written some villains, those Skeletor kind of people are pretty easy to write for.

Robin (19:36.652)
Right, exactly, the pure cartoon. Right, right, right.

Robin (19:46.382)
yeah!

Robin (19:51.596)
Yeah, it is. It's super perfect. Sure, sure. I mean, it's fun. It's fun. Yeah. There's a place to be clear. mean, there's a place in our culture for the Skeletor is in the Megatrons and the, you I was about to say Dr. Doom, but actually Dr. Doom is quite interesting. Dr. Doom's got some texture.

Lee Schneider (20:05.992)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (20:09.555)
Yeah, I wanted to seg a little into what some people consider the evil villain of our time, which is AI and your approach to technology, which is, look, you're a tech guy. can, you can, you know, you, you have the ability to even code things and make things in the tech world, plus books and love books and physical things. But I read your zine that, you know, that

You sent it to me in the mail, you know, just a real... And I've given a lot of thought myself to the encroachment of AI on what we're working on. Like, yes, I use some of these tools. I do not put any fiction writing into them ever, but I do put promotional copy and I'm trying to keep the world separate.

Robin (20:39.118)
In the mail, the whole USPS,

Robin (21:02.114)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (21:02.877)
Do you do that and how long do you think you will do that and will there be a breaking point?

Robin (21:09.07)
It's a boy. It's a first of all, just I want to acknowledge the question. It's a it's it is the question and it's not going to be resolved anytime soon. It's not like another nine months will pass and we'll all say, oh, we we figured that one out. Thank goodness. I think it is an epochal tension and it's not going away. It's only going to increase. Yeah, I will. I will answer your question, but I do. I just want to I feel like I'm inflating a beach balloon. I just want to pump it up even more.

Lee Schneider (21:30.301)
No, no, that's good.

Ha ha ha.

Robin (21:35.052)
Because it is, and again, and I also think it's easy to say, on one hand it's easy of course to say, this is like the doom of art. It's also easy to say, some of the, think, really thoughtful defenders of AI and all sorts of tech tools, they point to things like the invention of photography and say, people said the same thing and what happened? No, it just ushered in a new forms, new techniques, new interests, new aesthetics and all that.

Again, I think it's kind of all true and the net of it is that it's hugely perilous. I think it's perilous. I I think there is a real chance that in some number of years, I don't think it's two or five or even 10, but like forms of art and sort of genres and formats that we know and love now could essentially be gone because they kind of don't make sense in a world of whatever.

infinite imagery and just, you know, virtuosic prose on demand. So I don't have any answers to that or at this point even really any strategies, but I do think that's kind of the severity of the situation. And, you know, for people who are inventive and, you know, are curious, there's certainly some opportunities there as well. So nice warm up, Sloan. What do you actually do?

Lee Schneider (22:48.505)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (23:00.531)
Thank

Robin (23:03.098)
I don't use it for any kind of writing. And I guess for me, it's partially principled and partially just because when I have dipped in to just test the waters, the quality has not risen to my standards. I will say that here's something that might be a little unique to my perspective and my experience that other folks might, in a sense, take for granted.

started using these tools or started exploring these tools quite a few years ago. I mean, this was before the explosion and really the revolution of chat GPT and certainly before the capability of these new modern models. And again, even the harshest critic has to acknowledge it's incredible. The fact that you can pose these questions to and challenges to a computer and have it complete them in seconds in plain human language is a beyond generational. It's an apoccal achievement.

Lee Schneider (23:48.199)
All

Robin (23:59.918)
But go back, you know, not that many years, 2017, 2018, there were these little wimpy versions of these models that could kind of generate, I don't know, modernist poetry. You know, was always, it was a little wonky, but it was interesting. And the thing that I found especially compelling at that time is that you actually made the model yourself. So rather than it being a product that you access in a far off data center that's been trained at, you know, great expense by Google or OpenAI or whoever,

It was this weird little thing that you cooked up yourself. I'm talking to you in this little office that I have. full of books and printing equipment. Years ago, I've got a computer in the corner, and years ago, I would set it up overnight to train a modest, primitive little language model. I would feed it old public domain science fiction stories and stuff I had gotten off of Project Gutenberg or the Internet Archive. That was so interesting to me. The results of it were not anything to...

really write home about and certainly nothing to publish. But the idea that the model was something was actually something that could be another part of my artistic output or creative decision making was super compelling to me. One of the main things that has changed is that that's no longer possible. These big models are requires so much data and so much time and so many computer chips to make. It's not this is way, way, way beyond the scope of what I can do in this little office. And so

you rely on the Googles and the open AIs. And here we finally arrived back at kind of my hangup. I don't know what they trained this thing on, you know? And for me, it's this really pretty deeply unsettling uncertainty where, you know, even if on a superficial level, I pose a question and something reasonable comes back, I just imagine all the garbage in there and the possibility that it could kind of bubble up like a little bubble of swamp gas, you know?

just crazy, gnarly, nasty stuff from deep in the balls of the internet. Which, by the way, it certainly has read. So for all those reasons, I'm pretty happy to consult the models for programming advice, to ask them, like, this code isn't working. Or like, what's the right syntax to do this particular thing in a web page? But when it comes to writing, I don't use them.

Lee Schneider (26:10.651)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (26:21.191)
yeah. And I think, For me, it's really question of who owns it, who's controlling it, who's it helping, who's it hurting. I just, right?

Robin (26:31.692)
Yeah, yeah, and those are good questions. They really are. Those are sharp questions that almost should, you can imagine them kind of in a little bar across every page on chat GPT and Claude and everything else.

Lee Schneider (26:40.018)
Yeah.

Lee Schneider (26:45.683)
Yeah, definitely. just I was reading rereading Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant's book about the Luddites. And, know, there is room for I don't know if we'll end up calling them new Luddites, but there is room for people who are just not going to buy into every new piece of technology when it comes on in on the scene. It's just not useful.

Robin (26:51.555)
Yeah.

Robin (27:07.116)
Yeah, again, boy, Brian Merchant is great. And I haven't read that book, but I followed his work, which continues. And I think it's just he's doing really urgent, worthwhile thinking. And feel like he's really working in the polemic tradition, which is fun. He just is. He's totally on fire. And something that is in there in the history of the Luddites, and actually just in a lot of technology history for decades now, is that there's

There's many different versions of new technology and they have different values baked into them. there's plenty of technologies that we use. I would say for my part that the web itself is one of them that actually are more print-like. And they have, and they kind of replicate some of those really wonderful values of print. And you can enumerate what all those are. There's a democracy and a certain kind of privacy and blah, blah, blah. So you can go on and on.

And I think some technologies and some tools, they kind of map to that better. And there's others that clearly don't. the ones that any kind of internet service, which is most of them these days, requires you to log in and give it all your data and slurps it all up to use for its own obscure purposes, you kind of go, OK, well, maybe that's not the kind of technology I'm excited about. And so again, it's not that you're, yeah.

You want the opportunity to pick and choose and say, I'm not, am I pro or anti-technology? Again, question is malformed. It's about what values I personally sort of subscribe to and want to see replicated and then even kind of enhanced by the tools we use.

Lee Schneider (28:41.521)
Yeah.

Lee Schneider (28:51.571)
All right. I want to mention your newsletter and I will include a link because anyone listening to this, should definitely subscribe. It comes out if I'm not mistaken every 29.5 days, right?

Robin (29:03.5)
Yeah, I try to try to I try to sync it up with the full moon. I sometimes slip a little bit, but that's that. That's the framework. That's the general framework. Yeah.

Lee Schneider (29:07.507)
That's the goal. And it just has an amazing amount of material. And every time I'm reading it, I'm thinking, well, how in the world do you have time to read all this stuff and put it into the newsletter? So do you have a 25-hour day? Or what's going on there?

Robin (29:24.174)
Wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that be great if someone was like, yes, I didn't tell you. In my youth, I invented a 25 hour a day machine. It's been the secret to my success. That would be fantastic. I will tell you the real secret. I am, you know, as a writer and just as a person in the world, I have strengths that I'm aware of and I also obviously have weaknesses that I'm very aware of. I would say one of my great strengths

maybe my top strength is I am a really, really good note taker. I started to have it years and years ago, mostly paper to start. I really was a scribbling in little field notes, notebooks kind of writer. And I still do that, but I've also actually built for myself a lot of note capturing tools. And it's nothing that would be useful to anybody else. It really is a strange little Rube Goldberg machine that just fits Robin and Robin's brain perfectly.

shot of that is that I have an extremely low bar for capturing something. I just, I mean, when people ask for writing advice, really of any kind, this is actually the first thing I say. Forget about, you know, prose or, you know, developing a plot or any of that. I mean, you get there eventually, but before all that, you do have to have material. And I think nearly everyone would be, certainly everyone who wants to be a writer of some kind.

would be incredibly well served by taking about four times as many notes or more as they currently do, regardless of that current volume. And it's just because you have a thought or you overhear something in the world or you read a little snippet in a book or on a web page and you think, that's interesting. And then sometimes you think, I'll remember that. You won't. You definitely won't. And so it's just such a favor to your future self and potentially the readers of your

Lee Schneider (31:11.325)
Yeah.

Robin (31:18.542)
email newsletter or your books or whatever it is to just save it. And then later, I've got a whole systems where I go back through that pile of stuff and I look at it again and some things I toss, other things I file into different channels. it's because of that that actually the production of the newsletter does take some work. But it's a lot more manageable and just something that's become for me a little bit of a machine, a little weekly and monthly machine.

Lee Schneider (31:45.863)
Yeah, you're right.

Robin (31:48.316)
all because I just am really good at sucking away the good stuff.

Lee Schneider (31:52.155)
Yeah, well, I too, I use paper notebooks, Life Term notebooks, Japanese notebooks, and all the read it later things. And I find the best thing really is I'll pick up notebook number 23 at the end of the month, and I'll just go through and make an index. I basically read everything in the notebook and just do an index, which I later do either digitize or.

Robin (31:57.102)
Mm-hmm.

Robin (32:11.522)
That's great. That's great.

Lee Schneider (32:18.235)
copy into some searchable form, but that retrospective is it because that helps so much just doing that.

Robin (32:23.157)
Yeah. It really does. I, yeah, I I love that. I do. It's funny. That's interesting that you, that you describe it that way. I do something very similar. The output is a little different. I don't do an index. I essentially do a digitization step. That's why I go through the paper notebook when essentially when it's full or when I just feel like it's time to move on to a new one. And I just go through. I, again, it's that second encounter. You sort of see it again and you think about it again. And sometimes I don't really.

Lee Schneider (32:46.312)
Yeah.

Robin (32:51.118)
do anything other than read it, type it, and I've got a couple different programs that I use to store all this stuff, kind of some that's more general thoughts and others that are really focused on fiction. Whether it's in development or just something that's going to be way, way, way in the future. But I transcribe it digitally, and I do think that's important in the modern world. And then it's very satisfying. I scribble it out of the notebook. go, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk, chk. And then at the end, actually, again, different people have different kind of.

preferences or maybe tolerances for stuff, but I throw the notebooks away. just, once it's on the computer, yeah, I just say thank you for your service and away it goes.

Lee Schneider (33:26.961)
Nice. Yeah, I was, I use pencils a lot and I looked at my hands and said, boy, there's a, these, my fingers are black. You know, with lead. It's a, yeah.

Robin (33:34.102)
Yeah, I know. It's as you feel like you feel like you're in school again. Yeah. And I'm a lefty. I'm a lefty too. So the pencil is I it's a mess. It's a huge mess. Yeah.

Lee Schneider (33:39.899)
Yeah, me too. You have to get notebooks that lay flat and all that stuff. Tell me a little bit about your studio. We can see a little bit behind you, but you're into a lot of things. So this is what's it like in there?

Robin (33:46.69)
Yeah, a little bit.

Robin (33:53.112)
What's it like in here? It's, I mean, it's a mess, which I, which I defend, which I defend. I, you know, sometimes I walk in and I go, man, what a mess. We'll look at all this junk. But, and of course I, you know, one imagines the, the spotless shining, you know, kind of architect's studio and it's all just bare wood and a coffee cup place just so. But I, I sort of have this, this lingering, long lingering suspicion that in a really super clean studio workspace.

Lee Schneider (34:10.611)
you

Robin (34:21.32)
nothing actually happens. Like nothing interesting actually happens. They're essentially for show. So this is not for show. This is for working. And it is the repository for all my books, although I actually did a big clean out this summer. I've lightened my load a little. But I also have computers. The computer I'm using now, some computers that I run different kind of web programs on. I've got printing gear, a lot of printing gear now. I've got a RezaGraph printer, which I just love.

essential tool for all sorts of things. I've got a, you can't see it on the video feed, but I've got a big booklet maker, which is wonderful for making just, you know, literally feed in stacks of paper and you get these wonderful folded and trimmed booklets at the other end. And then, yeah, just a whole, a whole hodgepodge of other stuff, media stuff. I call it the media lab. And so this is kind of like, if you want to, if you want to, if you want to do something with some form of media, you probably can do it in here.

Lee Schneider (35:13.391)
media.

Lee Schneider (35:19.409)
Nice. So if you could have written any book, what would that book be?

Robin (35:26.354)
Any book? Wow, what a good question. Well, I'll tell you my instinctive answer. And I don't know if it's the best, but sometimes the first thing that pops into your mind is revealing. It probably would be one of the culture novels by Ian Banks. Maybe like, it kind of doesn't matter which one player of games say, because that's one of my favorites. I've said this before. I just think Ian Banks is a giant, just an incredible science fiction writer.

Um, for a lot of reasons, but, mostly, you know, I kind of think of imagination of the future and some of it is that world building that you're talking about. Just that really like, you know, well, okay, what is it really? Um, I think of that as like a muscle. Um, cause I actually think a lot of writers, maybe most really of fiction could conjure pretty good, like near future in five years or 10 years or 15. And we see, I mean, we see that I feel like that's actually become a very.

normal tool of literary fiction, like forget genre, forget science fiction. I just feel like everybody's doing it. And that's fine. don't you need just need to be a good writer to be able to do that and have a kind of standard writer's imagination. I think you go further, you know, 100 years, 200 years into the Star Trek's of the world or beyond. And I think it takes some training. I think there are muscles that you need to develop. You need to have like worked them. And if I'm right, and if we follow that analogy,

Lee Schneider (36:42.803)
Thank you.

Robin (36:53.1)
Then Ian Banks was the Arnold Schwarzenegger of sci-fi. mean, just bulging muscles. Because his world of the culture is set in this distant, remote, far future, really, really far away from anything that is here and now. And it's so compelling. mean, it's spectacular. And it's really inspiring, too. Rare among science fiction futures, it's a future you actually would want to live in.

Lee Schneider (37:17.841)
Hmm.

Robin (37:22.636)
It's a universe you would want to live in. So I think those aspirations are probably fairly plain in Moonbound in my latest novel. I tried to push myself in that direction, but I'm still just a weenie little gym rat compared to Ian Banks. So it'd be cool to have said, yeah, no problem. I did that.

Lee Schneider (37:37.875)
Yeah.

Lee Schneider (37:42.821)
Well, I'm looking forward to your next reps for sure. Keep going. What do you think is the state today of science fiction and fantasy writing and publishing?

Robin (37:45.452)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm working on it. I'm working on it. Yeah.

Robin (37:55.538)
that's a big question. You know, I think it's unsettled because I think this is true across all different forms of media. It seems to me, including, you know, things that seem as disparate as like video games. We've always had genres, but it seems to me that, and this is just my own assessment, my own personal kind of take on it, but it seems like the genres have hardened and become almost like checklists. And you'll sometimes hear people talking about novels.

or video games or movies as sort of a list of characteristics like, Robin Sloan came out with his fourth novel. What is it? well, it's a near future friends to lovers, you know, thriller vampire romance with elements of, I don't know, noir or something. like, well, those are a bunch of tags, you know. Yes, I guess those would be the tags of the Amazon product page.

Lee Schneider (38:48.883)
It's like tokens. It's almost like tokenizing.

Robin (38:55.054)
And I find that a little, I just as a reader myself, I don't think about books that way. I don't kind of go looking for books that like check all my boxes as it were. I mean, I do have boxes. I have things that I like. But what excites me really, you know, just as an example, there's a terrific writer named Ray Naylor who wrote a novel called The Mountain in the Sea and then a newer one called Where the Axe is Buried. And like for me, the box is

It's a big box and it says Ray Naylor. And you're like, check. Because you want to follow that mind kind of wherever it goes. So that's not really much of a comprehensive diagnosis of the state of the field right now. But I guess I'm eager for the moment when that pendulum swings in a slightly more open-ended and surprising direction. I don't think anybody really is well served by kind of the

the check listification of any kind of media,

Lee Schneider (39:58.885)
Is there anything that we forgot to talk about that you wanted to bring up that we should get into?

Robin (40:03.022)
Oh, what a good question. Not really. We covered a lot of ground. I do think, you know, we talked, we talked obviously about AI and the future of AI and all that kind of stuff. in my, in my, you know, sense of peril, I do think there's a real opportunity and it's a growing opportunity for people who are interested in essentially doing things offline and producing things far away from the tensions and the kind of whatever, you know, the

the morass, the vortex of all this stuff. And it's not just AI AdLine. I mean, it's the way all these platforms work, which really, it's gotten really bad. mean, is a, to try to build an audience on the internet of 2025 and beyond, it's almost like you're just lighting incense sticks and making offerings to the gods, except the gods are the algorithms, you And then some people kind of dutifully make their offerings and are rewarded, but...

lots and lots of people do it and there's nothing. And I think the thing that is so compelling about the physical world is that it still does actually reward effort. Now, it doesn't reward it with, my gosh, I woke up and 10 million people had listened to my podcast, you know, or watched my video. But that's fine. You you didn't want 10 million people paying attention anyway. That's just nobody. It turns out that's not actually pleasant for anyone. You can find 100 readers.

Lee Schneider (41:28.627)
Mm-hmm.

Robin (41:32.332)
And you can find a thousand readers and those readers might pay you real money to like buy a zine or, you know, come to it, come to your reading at a bookstore, whatever it is. you know, you mentioned my zine project earlier and for me, that has been a hugely exciting thing in the last year or so. I'm, plan to continue it for the foreseeable future. it's been such a pleasure to send this real printed thing, in the mail to people all over the world, not just in the United States, but all over the world. And,

Lee Schneider (41:50.952)
Great.

Robin (42:02.092)
So I think there's legitimate, people should feel some legitimate excitement about those opportunities. And it's almost like the more powerful the digital gets, and that's both the algorithms and these new AI things, I truly think the more attractive and just kind of fun the physical will become.

Lee Schneider (42:23.345)
That's a great note to end on. love that. I haven't cracked that one yet. A few years ago, I bought an old manual typewriter and I just love typing on that thing. And then I realized, you know, to actually produce anything longer than a letter is insane.

Robin (42:28.461)
Yeah.

Robin (42:37.294)
Yeah. Yeah. Think about the way they used to make books. I read a lot of book history and I sometimes, and you just go back and you contemplate the laying out the pages with individual pieces of movable type and you say, how did anyone ever print anything? But they did. They did.

Lee Schneider (42:58.109)
Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. The care. Well, anyway, thanks so much for being on the show. This is really a pleasure. It so nice to meet you and great to hear what you're into and what you're working on.

Robin (43:12.972)
Yeah, thanks. Thanks again, Lee. This was a real pleasure.